Perspectives

A Little History

At the end of the Middle Ages, in a small town in the Rhine Valley, an unassuming
metalworker
tinkered with a rickety wine press, metal alloys and oil-based ink. The result of his
labors was an invention that took the world's information and made it exponentially more
accessible and useful.

Six centuries later, we're seeing the same kind of innovation in the way we access
information. Every day, with a few keystrokes on a computer, people are doing more than
simply visiting their favorite web pages. Like Gutenberg, they are expanding the frontiers
of human knowledge.

This same philosophy lies behind Google Books. We believe a tool that can open up the
millions of pages in the world's books can help remove the barriers between people and
information and benefit the publishing community at the same time. Many of the world's
largest publishers have joined our Partner Program so that readers
everywhere can discover their books. These partnerships are very successful, and the
program continues to grow.

Yet some of these same publishers have filed suit to stop our Library Project. In that project, we're partnering with
libraries to scan both public domain and in-copyright books. We carefully protect copyright
holders by making sure that when users find a book under copyright, they see only a
card catalog-style entry providing
basic information about the book and no more than two or three sentences of text
surrounding the search term to help them determine whether they've found what they're
looking for.

So why has such a universally useful tool become so controversial? Because some in the
publishing community question whether any third party should be able to copy and index
copyrighted works so that users can search through them, even if all a user sees is the
bibliographic information and a few snippets of text, and even if the result is to make
those books widely discoverable online and help the authors and publishers sell more of
them.

Some of our critics believe that somehow Google Books will become a substitute for the
printed word. To the contrary, our goal is to improve access to books – not to replace
them. Indeed, we're working closely with publishers to develop new tools and opportunities
for selling books online.

Copyright law is supposed to ensure that authors and publishers have an incentive to create
new work, not stop people from finding out that the work exists. By helping people find
books, we believe we can increase the incentive to publish them. After all, if a book isn't
discovered, it won't be bought.

That's why we firmly believe that this project is good news for everybody who reads,
writes, publishes and sells books.